When
you look at an apple, you say that it’s red because the fruit absorbs all
wavelengths of visible light except for wavelengths associated with the colour red. That wavelength
bounces off of the fruit and into your eye, where it is then processed by your
brain.
That’s
how vision works.
To trick
your vision, an invisibility cloak would have to stop light from bouncing off
objects and back to your eye.
One
theoretical way to do this by making the relevant wavelengths of light bypass
the object, so that light from behind the object bends around it from the
perspective of a viewer. It becomes
particularly tricky when you want to do this from all sides of the object. It
becomes somewhat easier if the background is just sky or we can get away with a
random blurry texture that doesn't catch the attention.
With a
flexible medium made up of many nanorobots, the nanosilc nanites of the
Paradisi stories, it is possible for information about the light incident on
cells on one side of a ship to be transmitted to and projected by the nanites
on the other side. It doesn't even need
to be perfect, just to avoid providing cues, that is hide fast changing distinctive features that catch a person's attention.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/scientists-have-developed-a-super-thin-skin-like-invisibility-cloak-2015-9?r=US&IR=T
"There are various prototypes that cloak objects in different ways — some can be fashioned out of extremely thin wires made of silica and gold, carbon fibres, silk, or a series of lenses — but the most promising technique involves manipulating light."
In fact,
catching the viewer's attention is necessary for a viewer to notice
something. We can see things without
noticing them. It's very easy to miss
that an important part of a foreground object is missing, or even that a huge
part of the background has changed. Even
a person can be swapped out to some else. Much of the research in this area
leads back to studies by Daniel Simons
as far back as the 1990s.
selective attention test
Selective Attention Test
Change blindness - classic
demo - plane
Derren Brown - Person Swap
NOVA | Inside NOVA: Change
Blindness
The "Door" Study
My Paradisi Lost stories
Encounters with wormholes and asteroids, exploited, benign and catastrophically dangerous feature in the Paradisi Chronicles stories, including my Casindra Lost subseries, which also feature genetic engineering, an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy - just the two of them, and some cats... There's another AI, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc.
Personal invisibility cloaks of a sort are one of many applications of nanosilc that appear in the Casindra stories - in my Moraturi stories we are more concerned about shielding and protecting from space dust, and patching up people and ships when the shielding is not quite up to it: interplanetary and interstellar space aren't empty by any means.
It is not space opera, stories that could be set anywhere, or space fantasy, stories that are more magic than science, but stories where real science drives the story, and clever engineering provides the solutions.
The stories aim to present real science in a way that will help us to think about our own planet, and to develop science and engineering that will conserve rather than destroy.
The Paradisi colonization aims to preserve the pristine ecosystems of New Eden, restrict mining to the other planets and asteroids of the system, and genetically modify people to suit the ecosystem rather than overwhelm it with introduced species - this is the mutliauthor Paradisi Universe my Lost Mission stories are set in: https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/
Casindra Lost
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS
Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16
Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18
Moraturi Lost
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS
Author/Series pages and Awards
